Jobs numbers better than expected

Job growth in July beat expectations but unemployment ticked upward, the Labor Department reported Friday, handing Mitt Romney and the Obama administration a statistic of choice as they spar over the state of the economy.

The economy added 163,000 jobs in July while unemployment ticked up slightly to 8.3 percent from 8.2 percent, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

Story Continued Below

The high unemployment numbers present a challenge for President Barack Obama as he tries to sell voters on his stewardship of the economy before the November election. Republicans have hammered the Obama administration over the amount of Americans out of work and pounced on the rising unemployment rate Friday.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a hammer blow to struggling middle-class families,” Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said in a release. “President Obama doesn’t have a plan and believes that the private sector is ‘doing fine.’ Obviously, that is not the case.”

The jobs figure released on Friday, however, was better than most mainstream estimates, with most analysts’ predictions hovering around 100,000.

On average in 2012, the economy is adding 151,000 jobs per month, according the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2011 that figure was 153,000.

The better-than-expected jobs figure gave the White House some breathing room and allowed the president to argue that the employment picture is improving, even if it is not good enough.

“We knew when I started in this job that this was going to take some time. We haven’t had to come back from an economic crisis this deep or this painful since the 1930s,” Obama said during a news event at the White House before then taking a shot at the economic proposals being offered by Romney and congressional Republicans. “Here’s the thing, we are not going to get there, we’re not going get to where we need to be if we go back to the policies that helped to create this mess in the first place.”

Jared Bernstein, an economist who worked for the Obama administration earlier in the president’s term, cheered the “nice pop on payrolls” but cautioned not to read too much into a single month.

“Keep your powder dry on this one,” he said in a blog post. “There are lots of other economic headwinds out there, not least of which is a GDP growth rate below trend, and that’s usually associated with weaker job growth numbers than we saw from the payroll report.”

Investors reacted positively to the news with the Dow Jones Industrial Average shooting up close to 250 points by the afternoon.

Analysts do not expect the economic outlook to change dramatically before the November elections, and Friday’s report did nothing to change those forecasts.